PF or 3.5e

>The mechanical core of the system is bad

The mechanical core is great. The "core rulebooks" are rather unbalanced, but the actual "core mechanic" and its prevalence within the system is what managed to take 2e and truly modernize it. Though some sacred cows dragged it down, 3rd edition remains as one of the most important steps in roleplaying history.

The simple idea of "Let's not use hundreds of interdependent subsystems that require thousands of charts, and instead have everything centered around a simple core mechanic" is what made 3rd edition a truly great system, not just to write for, but to design for. It brought an unprecedented level of clarity to the game mechanics, and allowed even disparate concepts and subsystems to readily intermingle. While balance was not held to the same standards as it is today, it did manage to iron out a lot of the issues from previous editions of D&D, and part of what makes it such a popular target for criticism today is simply that the clarity and depth of the mechanics is readily understood and discussed. It's core mechanic is so simple, even small children can understand it and debate about it.

It hardly takes an expert DM to adapt the game to suit their group's tastes once they've become familiar with the fairly rudimentary mathematics that are detailed in the Dungeon Master's Guide and other accompanying books. Even the Monster Manual goes to great lengths to explain the underlying system beneath its numbers, and helps DMs to adapt monsters to suit their needs or to create their own monsters from scratch.

It being the most popular system for the better part of a decade made it the most written-about system, providing a wealth of criticism coming from hindsight/personal taste. But, to try and say that it's a game with no virtues except for size is simply being blind to most of what makes truly great games great, and you do yourself a disservice by treating the system with lingering "System-War-Scorn."

>The mechanical core is great
Vanician is shit, maneuvers are shit, HP bloat is shit, AC becomes shit the more you level, Save or die is shit

So what do you mean by mechanical core? that it uses a d20?

>The mechanical core is great
>a simple pass/fail system is "great"

what are you, fucking five years old? hell, even a kindergartner could probably conceive of something between "fail absolutely" and "get everything you want"

>but I really want to check out these more crunchier and crazier games.
Usually I'd recommend that you take a fresh breath of air and play something else entirely, like shadowrun.

If you're really serious about playing this sort of stuff, I'd suggest trying ADND.

Also CR is shit

If you had to choose from those 2, I'd say PF. 3.5 had a lot more broken shit, not saying PF is any kind of balanced. It's mostly by virtue of having more material, honestly. Paizo is trying its best to catch up in this regard.

I guess in the pdf/character builder app era I'd gotten used to everyone always having access to their own copy of the book to do those things, if it came up.

Oh, sorry, I should have known you were this kind of person. I didn't mean to trigger your system war PTSD.

>3E invented standardized core mechanics
And WoW was the first MMO. Come on, you can't actually expect us to believe you're not full of shit when you say shit like that.

I'm already gearing up for some AD&D but sadly I think I have only a friend or two that would be into playing such an ancient and different style of D&D. But it will definitely happen.

As for shadowrun- what the hell is it? I really don't understand it, sometimes I hear about magic in regards to it, is it a modern setting? I know there was that one thread awhile back when we turned that black guy into a shadowrun character.

Literally 80s cyberpunk with magic and elves and dragons and shit.

Shadowrun is cyberpunk dystopia future with magic. Big companies pretty much control everything, and you play as a group of people off the grid who do dirty deeds. It's pretty fun, though I'm pretty new. The system isn't super great, but the setting is nice.

Dude, the fact that theyre posts in Paizoblog by the fucking devs stating they dont want balance and they aren never going to balance and that martials deserve to be shit literally destroys your point

The fact that CMD and CMB makes maneuvers impossible to martials
The fact that, unlike 3.5, the more material PF releases the more martials fall behind due shit like Arcanist and other uberbroke casters (3.5 is shit, but at least non core casters werent as broken as core ones so you could ignore core classes and have a decent game), etc This must be bait

While the other user was rather acerbic, if you could provide a counterpoint it might help your argument. Short and harsh as they might be, they did quite precisely pinpoint a few of the key mechanical problems in 3.PF. Not all of them, even just looking at the core mechanics, but most of the obvious and difficult to deal with ones.

It's Richard Petty. If he provides a counterpart it's going to be an appeal to popularity or retarded solipsism.

Don't remind me that Jason Bulmahn's screencap.

What 3rd edition did is to see a system that had expanded in all directions mechanically, and figured out a number of intelligent ways to greatly simplify them and to unify various disparate elements. Of course, this didn't happen without a lot of issues (having all the classes level the same but trying to keep certain benchmarks at certain levels is the primary reason why class imbalance was what it was), but it was an important milestone in RPG design, and ultimately one that was in spirit repeated with 4e and 5e, which once again looked at a number of expanded systems and trimmed them down, with 5e doing so dramatically.

3rd edition was by no means a perfect edition, but the game was made far more accessible and intuitive as far as the core mechanics were concerned. Just looking at changes like ref/fort/will saves compared to saves vs. wands should help illustrate that this was a game that was continuing to move beyond its wargaming roots. It's an important stepping stone that eventually lead to 4e and 5e, and it'd be good of you to try to stop seeing it in such an antagonistic light simply because it continues to retain a measure of popularity.

I mean, PF doesn't have a cancer mage or a pun pun. It doesn't have any good ways for infinite damage. Casters are broken compared to martials, and Paizo said it doesn't care about balance, but they said that in reference to being 3.5 legacy. They don't want to change the way 3.5 did it, which is shitting on martials.

It does have an arcanist and combos that require direct intervention and countering or else they're going to blow up entire encounters, though.

While I usually dislike the whole thing of 'treating everyone who disagrees with you as a single person', it feels like 'Richard Petty' has come to describe a kind of argument rather than an actual individual.

And it's hard to say you made the wrong call given that resorted to >it'd be good of you to try to stop seeing it in such an antagonistic light simply because it continues to retain a measure of popularity.

When you see someone shit up the board for a year with the exact same arguments and argumentative style, it's pretty easy to pick him out of a crowd when he's doing the same thing.

Those are just things that can be altered mechanically without really that much effort. It's similar to 4e's HP "crisis", which can be solved with a simple formula, and ultimately comes down to being a matter of taste.

Those issues were far worse in the 2e, with the exception being that HP didn't scale that high and resulted in much "swingier" combat, which is generally considered by most players a negative trait. Vancian limits in 2e were harsher and less fun, THACO was awkward before becoming absolutely irrelevant, and SoD was far more prevalent. In fact, the 3.5 revision greatly reduced the amount of SoD that the original printing had.

3rd edition made a lot of important decisions that changed the gaming landscape, and ultimately were pivotal in the creation of 4e and later 5e.

>which is generally considered by most players a negative trait.
[citation needed] right the fuck now.

Man, it is kinda fascinating. You so elegantly avoid ever having to actually give examples or make proper justifications. You reference other games, make sweeping statements about impact and then imply that your opponents are just mad because their favourite system isn't popular.

Have you ever thought about going into politics?

we had simple systems before the second goddamn millennium

"D&D but without all the retarded complex bullshit (but still with a whole bunch of pointless complicated busywork)" wasn't ever revolutionary, maybe it was a big fucking deal for people who only ever played games with "Dungeons & Dragons" on the cover but the rest of the world had had over two decades of RPG development, we'd already figured out shit like "partial success" and "fail forward" and "genre convention" we weren't flailing around in the dark like a bunch of idiots waiting for Monte Cook and company to come enlighten us with the mystical revelation that you can adjudicate climbing and jumping and fighting with the same damn dice

It's more of just a boogeyman used by trolls to call anyone who is tired of System War antics so late in the game.

Those system war wounds run deep, and it really seems to cloud people's assessments over games. The only good thing that's happened thanks to the passage of time is that people have relaxed their opinions on 4e, even though these relaxed opinions came too little and too late.

With 3.PF still remaining a popular topic of discussion, we're very likely to see system war antics continuing for years, complete with boogeymen, strawmen, and all those other silly "tricks" used by people who don't want to admit that these system rivalries are cancerous and distort any balanced discussion.

>What 3rd edition did is to see a system that had expanded in all directions mechanically, and figured out a number of intelligent ways to greatly simplify them and to unify various disparate elements.

nigga V:tM came out in 1991

that's nine fucking years of unified mechanics before D&D 3e hit the shelves

GURPS came out in 1986, and even before that you had BRP in 1980. Unified mechanics are nearly as old as D&D itself and 3E was in no way the reason this got adopted by the RPG community at large - nearly every RPG at the time 3.0 happened was already using a unified core mechanic.

I've got no hard-and-fast numbers to prove 3.5 has more of these combinations than PF, and that their degree is worse, so at this point it would be us both just saying the other is wrong. I've stated my opinion of the 2, and that's all I can really do without data.

Casters are broken, as you said. I'll never deny that, as I've often argued with others who thought they were fine. I'm not aware of many combos that require intervention off the top of my head, but I don't have everything committed to heart, so I trust you know what you're talking about.

I'm not actually sure why the system war is relevant?

It is a direct, simple and self contained point to say 'the core mechanics of 3.PF are deeply flawed'.

We can explore this, again in a self contained way, simply by looking at the core combat system. Without considering classes or class design, we can see a system where, in addition to attacks, an effort was made to give characters engaging in combat a number of options, adding tactical depth and variety to the system.

However, we can also clearly see that virtually all of these options save simply hitting the enemy are far, far too weak, man of them being worse than doing nothing at all given that they make it very likely the opponent will be given an extra chance to attack you.

This lack of variety, at the very fundamental level, permeates the martial combat system, making it impossible to really make meaningful choices as a martial combatant without the addition of extra subsystems or the GM being forced to houserule and improvise to make anything not a simple attack actually beneficial rather than disadvantageous.

In a game where fantasy combat is a key part of the premise, the combat system being so badly executed at this fundamental level seems to justify saying that the core mechanics of the system are, in fact, bad.

PF doesn't have theoretical op cheese to the same degree - the only things that come to mind immediately are Blood Money laughing at WBL and level 20 Oracles being able to infinitely Awaken themselves.

May I ask why your friends are up for playing 3.5/pf but not ADND?

The problem is that that sleazy fucker defines the core mechanics as 1d20+bonuses vs DC, not what the core mechanics actually are.

What examples would you like? I didn't realize you were obsessed with minutia and needed every point explained to you like a child unfamiliar with the topic of discussion.

Is there any point you would even try to contend with?

Really? Are you unfamiliar with the concept of people complaining about combat being too "swingy"? While this is an asset in Old-school style high-lethality gaming, high-lethality is not really so much in vogue with modern gaming and is generally reserved for retro-style or "dark" themed games.

Do you really need a citation for what should be general knowledge?

People complain about swingy combat when you don't have any options to mitigate it, like low level D&D. Not the same thing, and I've met a lot more people who complain about plinking away at massive HP pools with peashooters, anyways.

Not quite as good as last time, but it's still a very effective sidestep. Completely avoiding actually answering the point, instead calling the opponents understanding of the topic into question, although the slight insult might be a bit much. Consider dialling that back just a tad when you're trying to get elected.

>Is there any point you would even try to contend with?

Simple, unified resolution mechanics did not originate with D&D 3e. Nor did D&D 3e do an especially good version of said unified resolution mechanics.

Binary pass/fail hinging on a swingy d20 with a mediocre +X skill system IS simpler than the mess of D&D 2e, but it IS NOT "great" by any metric. (In fact, one could argue that it's worse than 3d6-roll-under-attribute from Basic, but even so...)

The assertion that D&D 3e's mechanics were somehow "revolutionary" or "changed the world of RPGs" or "brought tabletop into the modern era" is patently false. Many other games did what D&D 3e did better and earlier. Some of those games have even been mentioned earlier in this very thread.

Hell, some of the people who worked on D&D 3e, including the LEAD DESIGNER, wrote games that did the things D&D 3e tried to do, but better, and before they worked on that game

>It is a direct, simple and self contained point to say 'the core mechanics of 3.PF are deeply flawed'.

If that's your statement, I'm going to go ahead and say "All core mechanics of every game are deeply flawed."

I can agree that 3.PF has issues that can be ironed out to improve the game, or require a DM to make certain selections, but we're still looking at a dramatic improvement over its predecessor, and it holds certain virtues that later editions did not port over quite as well. We can argue about the deep flaws in every single edition of D&D (or really, any game), but at some point a fair amount of them will ultimately come down to a question of just how difficult is it really to change the game to suit your tastes and how much of your complaints are your tastes. While I'm willing to say the core mechanics of 5e are deeply flawed, I find that statement somewhat of a maligned slight to the system.

>we can also clearly see that virtually all of these options save simply hitting the enemy are far, far too weak,

That's really an excessive reduction of the complexity of "hitting the enemy." While "hitting the enemy" is generally the best option, the options available in doing so can get quite complex. While at higher levels the "fullattack" necessity drags things down, what goes into a full attack can end up requiring an impressive amount of calculations.

>making it impossible to really make meaningful choices as a martial combatant
I disagree. You really seem to be trying to reduce the game down to almost a parody of the game, ignoring basic things like process of engagement, placement, and everything else that makes combat more than "I move and attack, I full attack, I full attack."

While I'm glad that they made combat better in 4e, you still need to keep in mind that the combat in 2e was far worse, and that 3.PF was a step in the right direction, even if it required some effort on the DM's part to resolve some of the math.

Simple mechanics didn't originate with 3e, and no one said otherwise, but 3e did do a great job at simplifying most of 2e's more awkward mechanics.

Could it have done better? With a decade plus of hindsight and modern sensibilities we can easily answer "yes", but at the time it was considered a fantastic step forward. Unless you were a grognard, but they're not called "grumblers" for no reason.

You are so fucking stupid I don't even know where to begin.

>Simple mechanics didn't originate with 3e
>Could it have done better? "yes"

So it didn't do anything particularly new and it didn't do anything especially well

Why should we praise this game again?

The rest of the post you ignored. Funny how that works.

Fucking neither.

Let me start by saying, good on you for wanting to expand your purview. Way too many people just stick with 5e and never explore other systems. But DO NOT play 3.pf. All you'll do is rediscover why 5e was necessary in the forst place.

If you want something with more options, I recommend either 4e as others have suggested, or GURPS. Which you'll like better depends on the type of crunch you want.

Do you find yourself wishing that combat had more options and that players had the ability to build their PCs in ways that allowed them tl be as effective as they wanted? Go with 4e. It's a great system with loads of options, and does a great job of making fights tactical.

On the other hand, do you find yourself annoyed at all the abstractions that come up in D&D and wish that things were more unified in a sensible way? Do you find yourself constantly arguiing with players about how much damage a falling log should do, or whether falling into a fire pit would kill you? Check out GURPS. It's extremely modular, and you can customize not just your setting, but how complex the rules you use are.

Try Fantasy Craft or Anima (specially Anima if you want crunch).

>3e was great because it took the radical step of standardizing system design
M8, there have been games since the 80s that did that.

If we go by the Three Legs of game design, "Old School" D&D was heavily gamist. It had a clear vision of what it wanted to do, and the system was designed around that. With the advent of AD&D hints of narrativism started seeping in, but it was still primarily a GAME.

3e tried to split the difference between the old school "RPG as game" paradigm and simulationism. It was such a mess that it's required 3 fucking revisions to become something approaching being playable

well you ignore 100% of everyone else's arguments in favor of repeating your dumbass "3e was revolutionary" memes over and over again, so it only seemed fair

Any of the old school D&D systems are great.

Don't fall for the "it's old so it must be shit" meme. If your friends continue being faggots remind them that this is where D&D started, it's the roots of the system.

D&D got popular for a reason: the old school stuff was well designed, well written, and provided for lots of fun

I guess the years of it dominating the charts until it settled into a comfortable #2 is testimony of it being "unplayable."

For a game that can't be played, it's pretty impressive for it to have had so many people playing it. Would that make every other game except for 5e and 4e even more unplayable?

OP have you considered visiting a PDF share thread? A lot of the stuff your looking for is "free". So why not give it a try and if you really enjoy it, purchase it after?

Given a choice between 3.5 and Pathfinder, I'll pick Pathfinder every time:
-Magic item crafting in Pathfinder isn't literally crippling to accomplish, so worlds with common magic make more sense
-Archetypes are, imo, much better than prestige classes when you're trying to go for a specific character concept
-Pathfinder took the core 3.5 classes and made them more interesting
-Anything good from 3.0-3.5 can be patched up to Pathfinder much easier than trying to patch Pathfinder down.
-Combat Maneuvers have been streamlined enough that, unlike 3.5, it's something worth pursuing by non-munchkins.

I've heard people rave about 4E from a mechanical standpoint, but IMO if I wanted that kind of gameplay I'd just go hop on an MMO where all my abilities were cooldowns and almost nobody is acting in-character anyway. That iteration of the game was designed to draw in the MMO crowd, so it's not surprising that it aped a lot of standard MMO systems.

If you're like me and you played a shitload of MMOs, this is likely not an appealing thing since we will just play MMOs if we want that experience. Dunno about you, but that's not what I'm sitting down at a table with friends for.

This is a pretty awful post.

Sorry I disappeared for a while. I've had a player cry at her character's death, and a lot of people who are way into roleplay. Old school D&D seems way into a lot of death at the start and more combat focused. There's also the fact that there are matrices and shite they'd have to be aware of. 3.PF seems convoluted, sure, but I think that they'd be more willing to approach a more modern, more popular, and more survivable game.

Keep in mind, I've only read through the AD&D PHB properly once (even then I know I missed a lot) and haven't read any 3.PF (though I've examined character sheets and watched some vid explanations).

If you played MMOs you would know why the comparison to an MMO falls flat on its face. It's closer to FFT if anything.

A fair warning is that the old systems do have some archaic mechanics and are a little rough at times. Still, they are all basically unique games and function inside of themselves, so you can have a lot of fun with them if they match your group's style.

If you're willing to step outside the comforting label of the D&D brand, I'd suggest looking at GURPS.

I played lots of MMOs, but only a small amount of 4E since I have never in my life had a local group willing to play that version. My insight may be off, but for the inverse reasons you seem to think. I read up on 4E a lot and was following the design discussions when it was coming out, that's all my statement was based off.

Here's the thing. Everything you're talking about as a 'strength' of the 3.PF combat system? Is implicit in the idea of tactical grid based combat.

A well designed system is more than the sum of its parts. 3.PF is barely the total, if not less in some important areas.

>I've heard people rave about 4E from a mechanical standpoint, but IMO if I wanted that kind of gameplay I'd just go hop on an MMO where all my abilities were cooldowns and almost nobody is acting in-character anyway. That iteration of the game was designed to draw in the MMO crowd, so it's not surprising that it aped a lot of standard MMO systems.

When will people stop repeating this ignorant lie?

I'm still a big fan of Pathfinder, but you know one thing that pisses me off about 3.PF?

Weapon ranges.

I mean come on, are you really telling me that the only difference between an Olympic gold-medal javelin thrower and some shlub off the side of the road is that, at the "maximum" range of 150 feet (laughable, the record for javelin throwing is over 300) is that the gold-medalist can hit what he's aiming for at that range?

Range should have been a much more flexible stat.

That's honestly how many people felt about the game mechanics. It's less a lie and more of an opinion you simply don't share, though many people do.

Though, you might be testy about that because it was one of the more common complaints repeated during ye old Great Edition War.

It's also flatly untrue. 'MMO edition' is, and has always been, a total and blatant falsehood rooted in ignorance from people with only the most basic, surface level understanding of what 4e is or was trying to do. That lot of people repeated the lie does not make it true.

>-Combat Maneuvers have been streamlined enough that, unlike 3.5, it's something worth pursuing by non-munchkins.
This is a lie of epic proportions, back in 3.5 you could have non optimized characters succeding in maneuvers, in PF is literally impossible even by heavily focused builds, specially if you're martial

You clearly don't know what you're talking about.
giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?406156-Dragon-wrestling-or-proof-that-CMB-CMD-is-attainable-to-the-point-of-being-broken

Being fair, in 3.5 it was still stupid to attempt manoeuvres the vast majority of the time without paying the excessive feat taxes not to get punched in the face every time you tried.

Monsters have CMDs of 60 and 70 at mid levels when the most optimized fighter ever created can barely reach 40 at 20th level, so, could you explain me why maneuvers are worth shit?

An example, my 24 Str Umonk has Imp Trip and Greater Trip and have a feat that lets me add Dex to maneuver attempts, my bonus is at 8th level 22 to Trip, well, at this level the average monster have a CMD of 38, I'd need a 16 to trip the average monster. Back in 3.5, the same character (because this was a translation), had lower bonus to trip yet could trip your average monster which had a bonus (taking into account is a contested roll so I give +11 to the monster's defense) 25, it was pretty doable, now it isn't. This gets exponentially worse the more you level.

>Monsters have CMDs of 60 and 70 at mid levels

Excuse you? The Tarrasque has a CMD of 66, and that's definitively not "mid level". An Ancient Red Dragon, CR 19, has a CMD of 52. Unless your definition of "mid level" is 20+, you are wrong.

Also, you must not be good at optimizing characters if you barely reach 40. Read the thing I linked, and you'll see a build for a dwarf with a CMB of almost 80.

>47 total CMB
>Greater wyrm has 65
>He needs a 18 to grapple
So, even with all those magic items, 20th level, perfect stats, class made to grapple (tetori), he still needs an 18. Thanks for proving my point.

I think that I'm decided that I'll get Pathfinder.
I'll definitely try out GURPS lite though and maybe I'll put 4e on my radar, I know an acquaintance of mine used to play it.

But a few questions remain:

Do I have to get the Bestiary too, and the Advanced Player's guide?

Is making a homebrew campaign easy enough, I'm not talking crazy stuff here just a basic "Dragon kidnap your princess, kill the dragon," deal.

Lastly, is the Pathfinder General totally degenerate? I'm not huge on anime titties so I've never checked one out for very long.

The dwarf's CMD is almost 80 but his CMB, not so much.

I don't know what the shit you're talking about, and I don't know what part of that you were skimming, so I cropped it down to the final bit.

That was the impression people got from playing the game. You can disagree, but you can't really call it a lie, especially because early 4e math made combat drag on and made powers feel repetitive.

While calling it the WoW edition might be more slander than fact, much of the art style, class construction, and enemy design did seem to be heavily influenced by WoW. While you may think that these things don't define the game, these are what most people initially interact with and are continually reminded of, and may have had more of an impression on them than you.

It's an opinion, and not a particularly uncommon one.

>Lastly, is the Pathfinder General totally degenerate? I'm not huge on anime titties so I've never checked one out for very long.

It's roughly 20% trolls, 70% game discussion, and 10% people upset about the trolls and how they're trying to define the community.

Given most commentary on the game, it's the impression people got from looking at it, seeing defined rolls and consistent power layouts, and crying because they lost their precious obfuscation.

The early math sucked, sure, but how is that any relation between 4e and MMOs?

Expressing an opinion is fine, acting like you're exposing some deep truth about the game which makes it not a 'real' RPG just makes you an asshole.

Average CMD for a CR 8 is 28. You need to roll a 6. That being said, at that level you're starting to run into Freedom of Movement and Flight, which will completely fuck some combat maneuvers.
The online bestiary is better for this since you don't really need to hand around the statblock like you wanted to do with the book. I'd peg /pfg/ at lower numbers of serious discussion than

but that's my impression. They also deal with A LOT of 3pp, so if you don't want to go fully down the playtest rabbit hole, you'll have to ask and hope somebody is feeling generous.

A more common complaint I've heard, more common than any you listed, was frustration towards the cooldown-based ability system. At will, once per encounter, once per day, etc.

Uses/day was the stalest fucking mechanic in 3.PF, and as far as I'm aware it's a fairly core part in 4E of how powers work.

>The early math sucked, sure, but how is that any relation between 4e and MMOs?

They were both designed top-down. As in "this is how we want the game to work, lets design around it" as opposed to "here's a bunch of mechanics, I hope it works as we envisioned!".

>Uses/day was the stalest fucking mechanic in 3.PF,

You just described 90% of the classes. Vancian casting is uses/day.

Except those aren't cooldowns, at least not in the way any MMO player would recognize. Abstract thematic timings that vary based on the length of scenes have a very different effect on pacing and gameplay to MMO's spammable tick down abilities. The comparison is bizarre.

...Just like most other games that turn out good?

Dailies are one of only three classes of power. At wills and encounters provide constantly usable sources of ability outside the daily attrition grind.

There are two people who call 4e "WoW Edition".

1: People who have not played EITHER game
2: People who repeat #1

It's more like Final Fantasy Tactics

>...Just like most other games that turn out good?

Yepp. I didn't say this is a bad thing (in fact I was trying to imply bottoms-up is fucking backwards).

I never said that I was fond of Vancian casting. Personally, I prefer the GURPS magic system.

That's funny, as an MMO player, they looked like cooldowns to me. "Once per encounter" is still a fucking bizarre metric by any train of thought other than "it's balanced I guess". If I know how to shout out a word that evokes some great magic, what's stopping me from shouting it more frequently? I understand the need to limit the amount that a character can use a strong ability, but there are so many more interesting, flavorful ways to do it that could make more sense from an in-universe standpoint.

>make more sense from an in-universe standpoint.

This tends to be the crux of the issue. D&D hadn't actually cared about this for a while, 4e abandoned the pretense in favour of good game design.

Whether or not you like that kind of mechanic is a matter of opinion, but it's sheer ignorance to pretend they didn't exist in D&D before 4e. All the system did was stop hiding things and lying to people.

>"Once per encounter" is still a fucking bizarre metric by any train of thought other than "it's balanced I guess".

It's actually a narrative design thing. Although very different in execution, a lot of narrative styled systems have abilities or effects that are timed based one 'once per scene' or 'once per story arc'.

Because yelling "you can do it!!" at someone tends to lose its oomph after the first time

I'm not pretending it didn't exist, I readily accept that it did. However, I don't like it in 3.PF either, and frequently houserule other systems in instead. Frankly I'd much prefer that characters are able to continue to try using powers, but stronger / more difficult powers require some manner of relevant check that gets harder with each attempt within a given time frame. I'm also not going to pretend that my system is perfect either, but the takeaway is this:

For a certain type of player, of which I am one, the implementation of how powers work in 4E was so unappealing, despite how balanced it may be, that it's just not really worth playing. That's not to say that the system is objectively bad, I'm just explaining why, in my case, it is subjectively bad.

And that's fine. You're making an informed and explained statement of opinion without falling back on a played out analogy which never made any sense in the first place.

I'd never say 4e was a system for everyone, if anything it's actually quite niche. But within that niche, cinematic fantasy combat, it executes it exceptionally well.

>I'm not pretending it didn't exist, I readily accept that it did. However, I don't like it in 3.PF either, and frequently houserule other systems in instead.

You are essentially houseruling most of the system then. You may as well apply the same houserule to 4e... but honestly it sounds more likely that you are better off playing some other non D&D game, like M&M3 or GURPS or whatever.

I own GURPS, and believe me if I could get my current group to muster the testicular fortitude to try anything beyond the D20 system we'd already be playing that.

Also, I'm lucky in that my group isn't munchkins at all, and are fairly happy running weaker characters, so there's lots of martials in my group and not many people going heavy caster. I'm in an uncommon position to do the kind of changes I want, since it's not deeply fucking with what the players are trying to do. There's far more use of Ki pools than spell slots in my current game.

>good game design

But, that's exactly what 4e didn't have.

Balanced? It's easy to make a balanced game if you reduce the effective differences between the options, which is what 4e did and ultimately suffered for, with its powers format reducing the available design space into a considerably more narrow focus. And, even then it wasn't as balanced as 4e fans would like to say it is, with clear tiers developing as people came to understand the system better.

If you want good game design, even PF did a better job than 4e, which is sad. Thankfully, 5e learned from the mistakes of its predecessors.

Anybody have that black guy picture?